High cover of forest in the landscape matrix has been shown to weaken the negative effects of habitat fragmentation on grassland butterflies. No studies have however focused on examining species‐specific responses of grassland butterflies to forest. The data from 3 years of butterfly monitoring in Southern Finland were used to test whether the amount of forest cover in the surrounding landscape affected the abundance of grassland butterfly species in semi‐natural grasslands, field margins, and forest edges. More than half of the studied species benefitted from high cover of forest. Species with the strongest preference for forested landscapes were Lycaena virgaureae, Argynnis adippe, Argynnis aglaja, and Boloria selene, which probably find suitable resources in herbaceous habitats at forest edges and clearings. Several small‐sized species were positively affected by surrounding forest cover in field margins but not in the other habitat types. Although field margins are suboptimal habitats for grassland butterflies, they provide important corridors for dispersal. High cover of forest in the landscape matrix may enhance butterfly dispersal along field margins by reducing windiness, which is likely to be most important for small‐sized species with poor dispersal capacity. The most abundant grassland species showed little or no preference for forested landscapes. Our results suggest that high cover of forest enhances the persistence of most grassland butterflies, including declining species, in boreal agricultural landscapes. The responses to forest are however strongly dependent on species‐specific properties and habitat types.
Improving public engagement in ecological research improves the visibility of science and educates a wider audience about the value of ecology and its study. To this end, we assess the success of two simple activities, designed to track forest cover and understorey conditions, implemented at Lammi Biological Station Science Trail, Finland, in terms of effective public participation and useability of the data generated. We consider how best to engage participants in the activities, and we validate the data obtained by comparison of its reliability and useability against standard ecological approaches. It is also increasingly timely for researchers to utilise the large datasets that can be generated through effective public engagement. If experiments are effectively designed, these data can provide information at a larger scale than is attainable with the resources typically available to individual research projects. Consequently, given high enough uptake, such activities hold the potential for upscaling or generalisation from their findings. Both activities proved useful to collect more intensive data than would otherwise have been feasible. The quadrat vegetation survey (Activity 1) provided useable data to determine species phenology but not species composition. The canopy disk observations (Activity 2) reliably tracked seasonal changes in canopy cover when calibrated against baseline data.Training in these activities fostered engagement in how climate change affects forest ecology, improving the quality of data collected, and engaging participants eager to learn about and contribute to research into these processes.
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